Advent of Code #3 – Part 2

Adding to my solution for #3 part 2, I finally got it, but I paid the price for not adding the “0, 0” to the data set and just assumed I should add one. Bad assumption! Wound up being off by 1 and it took too long to figure that out. select distinct xvalue, yvalue from […]

Advent of Code #3 – Part 1

Part 1 isn’t bad. Parse a string that has direction indicators and track each location you stop at. I’m trying to do one more today and running out of time, so I hurried to a solution that works, but will just suck when I get to part 2 of #3 (2 movers). Skip down to […]

Advent of Code #2

This one gives you a 1000 rows of package dimensions. You calculate the surface area needed for wrapping paper, plus some ‘slack’ that is the area of the two smallest dimensions. The first part is easy, the second – how do you figure out the two smallest numbers when represented as “4x2x10”? First part was […]

Advent of Code Contest

I saw the post from Steve Jones about the Advent of Code contest and decided to take a look. The first one is about figuring out which floor Santa is on based on the characters in the string. I don’t know that I’ll do all of them, but it was a nice break from other stuff […]

A Sherlockian Question Of the Day & Why I’m Writing Questions

If you haven’t noticed by now I’ve been writing quite a few questions of the day for SQLServerCentral. It started, as things often do, as just something to do that was different (before this year, my last one was in 2006!) but it’s grown beyond that. It’s a really interesting short form of writing and […]

Google IQ Test

Friday (Dec 20, 2013) the Google Doodle was a crossword puzzle. I was curious so I clicked and yes, it was a full puzzle. It’s been years since I did a crossword. I did them for many years on Sunday, kind of a family tradition, but stopped somewhere along the way – I think it […]

Baseball and Scheduling Your Vacation, and a Puzzle?

I saw an article in the newspaper titled How to Visit 30 Ballparks in 35 Days This Summer. I think it would be an I interesting idea to visit all of them and see some of America in the process, but doing it in 35 days seems less like fun and more like work – […]

Spring Training 2010

Life was busier than I would have liked this year, but made it to one game, Braves vs Tigers, for a nice afternoon in the sun. Nothing like Florida in mid March; 85 degrees, humidity bearable, and nothing to do but sit back and enjoy the day!